The Greek Islands

by Lawrence Durrell

  We owe the anecdote to Plutarch in The Moralia, which is an essay on oracles and gods and their habits – ideal holiday reading, by the way. Our Elizabethans must have known the name of Paxos from this text. A ship carrying both freight and many passengers found itself becalmed off Paxos, with night falling. Everyone was awake, and many were lingering over their dinner. Suddenly they all heard a voice coming vaguely from the direction of Paxos, which called upon the ship’s pilot, one Thamus, an Egyptian. He was called twice, but he did not answer, presumably disbelieving his ears; the third time he was told in a louder voice: ‘When the ship comes opposite Palodes you must announce the death of the Great God Pan.’ At first Thamus thought he would not do it; he would sail right past Palodes. But there they lay, becalmed, and finally at the indicated spot he shouted out the news, at which a great wail of lamentation arose out of the sea.

  ‘Momentous’ is the mot juste – for the heart of the ancient world had stopped beating. Later the mystagogues were to claim that this moment marked the very moment of the crucifixion – the reader is free to believe or not. But from this point the pulse-beat of human civilization changed its epicentre, and the vitality of the ages flowed out of Greece into Rome.

  The only other interesting piece of history concerning this tiny spot is probably fiction – though it is pleasant to think it might have been true. Antony and Cleopatra are said to have had a dinner party here on the eve of Actium – where so many of their hopes were destroyed.

  What else? The little, flat-roofed villages have water trouble in common with so many Greek islands; they live on cisterns and try to hoard winter rain. But the summers are fierce. There are good little harbours for small-boat owners.

  It is in this channel that I have seen, on more than one occasion, the huge plate-like form of the hawksbill turtle spinning languidly about in the wake of the vessel. It can reach a metre in length, this strange animal, and is astonishingly agile in the water. It is only one of a variety of sea-creatures which you may be lucky enough to glimpse as the boat furrows its path on down towards the Lefkas Channel. The land has become poorer towards the east, mountains melting to lowlands.

  The heavy-jowled Albano-Epirote mountains have steadily given place, first to bony scrubland, and now to marshlands which dwindle away among malarial lagoons – all very fine for winter snipe-shooting and even the occasional boar – but pestilential in summer, indeed unbearably sad in their desolation, especially after a taste of Corfu. Arta, Prevesa, Missolonghi – they seem to belong to another circle of the Inferno, but of course they are not island towns. Rancid green lakes where water-snakes, flies and green terrapins squirm about – and solitary birds unused to the gun. Trelawny, the keen hunter, found a new Italian Maremma here; Byron skulking about, hunting for remains of the city which was built to commemorate Actium, found a few bits of broken wall. Nobody who visits Missolonghi can help wondering whether it was not an acute malarial fever which carried off Byron. But we ourselves are still at sea, thank heavens.

  One should recall another not infrequent visitor to these caves and quarries among the deserted islands; it was once quite a usual sight, but has now become increasingly rare. The little monk seal – a brownish mammal (monachus monachus) whose fur is not particularly fine but which has, or had, a delightfully unconstrained manner, presumably because it always found secret coves to breed in and to fish from, and was relatively unmolested. When I was a small-boat owner, I saw the little creature on several occasions, usually in a still summer sea, where it gives the impression from a distance of being a swimmer; but it was always surprising to see one so far out in mid-channel. One seal allowed me to come to within four or five metres of it; of course, I had switched off the motor and approached with oars. Then it submerged, but very slowly, and with an apparent reluctance. Before World War II a small colony of them was reported from the deserted islet north of Corfu, called Errikusa, where they sunbathed on the flat rocks like nymphets, or emanations from some ancient Greek myth. What happens today, I wonder? The fishermen say that mostly they have been destroyed because they had the bad habit of tearing the nets after emptying them of their catch. Perhaps they have disappeared for good? I hope not.

  The sad little island of Lefkas (or Santa Maura) has little to interest the modern traveller at its northern end, where its position vis-à-vis the mainland suggests a vermiform appendix. The little canal is always silting up, and there has been some learned controversy as to whether it is really an island at all. It has, however, always been taken for a member of the Ionian group, though it cannot vie in natural interest and beauty with the others. There is some pretty inland scenery, but movement is hampered by a defective road system, and nowadays the passenger boats normally do not call in very often. The visitor who really wants to explore it must be prepared for long and stony trudges and longish, bumpy drives.

  Whatever the limitations of Lefkas, it has one feature which commands the attention of the world – the White Cliffs from which the poetess Sappho made her ill-fated leap into eternity. Was it accident or intent? We shall presumably never know, and the ancient authorities are as usual not ancient enough, and somewhat vague in their descriptions of what went on. There was, on the penultimate crag by the lighthouse, a temple of Apollo, and the jump itself was one of something like seventy-two metres from a deeply undercut cliff. Confused legends suggest that the ancients believed that one could leap straight down into the Underworld from here – or at least link up with the River of the Dead, the Acheron. Other traditions say that one could cure oneself of the pangs of disprized love by making the leap, and that this is what Sappho had in mind. The question of intent must rest vague, but the actual leap (unless the whole thing is simply a legend) has struck the imagination of the world. It seems appropriate to the greatness of the poetic star – just like the leap of Empedocles into the crater of Etna. At any rate, it struck a spark in the imagination of young Byron when he was among the islands, and his interest makes one wonder whether he did not have in the back of his mind some idea of emulating Sappho. He was extremely puffed-up by his triumphant swim across the Hellespont, and on the look-out for other deeds as picturesquely suitable to the foremost profligate and love-poet of the day. Suitable or not, he did not risk repeating the Sapphic jump.

  As far as Sappho is concerned, it seems that something went wrong. For in the time of Cicero and Strabo the jump was often, and quite safely, accomplished. The priests of Apollo performed it regularly without hurting themselves, and boats were organized to recuperate jumpers. Sometimes plumes and wings were attached to the shoulders of those who chose to leap. The jump itself was called Katapontismos, and one wonders if it did not have some ancient propitiatory function. For example, when a whole village had to expiate a sacrilegious act or avert some bad luck, a scapegoat might be chosen – usually the village idiot – who was symbolically beaten with rods and made to repent, before being shoved over the cliff into the sea. If he did not die, he was fished out and from thenceforth treated as if dead; he must choose another village to live in. One of the functions of the temple was probably something of this kind. But the puzzle of Sappho remains – what sort of accident was it?

  The fact remains that it is a breathless and bone-cracking excursion up to St Nicholas, where the White Cliffs are. You can see the leap, however, if you have good glasses when the Athens-bound steamer passes outside the island. It is perhaps not as distinctive a feature as the White Cliffs of Dover, but nobody celebrated has ever jumped over them and into the Channel.

  From the point of view of Homeric references, the cliffs find a recognizable place in the Odyssey – figuring, as would be quite reasonable, as a celebrated navigational aid to seamen, rather like the Erice headland in Sicily, or the temple of Sunion. Is it worth mentioning that despite the clearest of textual indications to the contrary, some archaeologists have argued that Lefkas is really the Ithaca of Homer? This ivory-skulled and contentious race of men, each determined to be original, is r
esponsible for almost as much confusion as the ambiguities of history, the intrusions of myth, the disappearance of sources; the poor traveller is bedevilled by their squabbles. One excepts, of course, great seminal dreamers like Schliemann who turned a great poem into a greater reality by proving that it was no invention but a historic fact; one excepts also Evans, with his extraordinary dream-vision of a whole civilization which came true. And we are lucky that in the Ionian there are relatively few bones of contention, so clearly has the terrain been mapped by Homer. A few dates may creak when it comes to the Corinthian War in these waters, or the distinct traces of a flourishing Mycenean civilization in the form of rich tombs; but relatively speaking it is plain sailing for the most part.

  But up there on the white cliffs of poetry, the wind blows with a steady cool drumming on the ears, and the asphodels tremble and nod among the barren rocks with their savage thistles. I once knew an Austrian botanist who spent some time camping upon the central spine of the island – for there are three small mountains in a line, like vertebrae. He was in search of a particular rock plant; he described vividly how, while he was sitting gazing down over the famous leap, he suddenly found himself enveloped in a white mist which had risen from the sea. It was quite a distinct emanation, and condensed into a shape with definite outlines. Inside it, he heard the mewing of seagulls and also the calling of human voices. The phenomenon was so strange that he became afraid and, rapidly packing up, took to his heels. Egon Kahr was his name. A few months later he fell from a high apartment building in Athens and was killed; he was holding a telephone in his hand which had been wrenched from the wall. There was no explanation forthcoming. Should there have been? In Greece, stories like this hang about in the air, somehow pregnant with a meaning that never becomes clear. They seem legendary, undisturbed, complete, meaningless as an echo.

  To what point are we the dupes of history and of fashion? After all, there are islands every bit as beautiful as Greek islands off the coast of Yugoslavia, off Scotland, in the Caribbean. Is one just a prey to a facile, poetic self-indulgence? The question will not hang in the air for long, and the answer will be an almost certain ‘No’. There is a special kind of presence here in this land, in this light; it is not uncommon for visitors of sensibility to have the almost uncomfortable feeling that the ancient world is still there, at their elbows, just out of sight. It is not the kind of ‘feyness’ of the Irish; it is not a belief in kelpies; it is something much stronger, akin to panic. Indeed, panic is the very word, and Pan the very person involved – albeit he is supposed to be dead now. The peasants still refuse to sleep in the shade of certain trees at noon, for fear of having their wits stolen away. There are spaces among the noonday silences, while the rough hand of the wind caresses the dry grasses of Delos or Phaestos when you almost overhear the little god breathing. Woe to you if his siesta is disturbed, for he goes on the rampage and sows a Panic fear in all who come his way.

  Pan has a strange history, and, as Lawson points out, in his role of patron god of Arcadian shepherd-life, he would have seemed rather an uncouth being to the average cultured Athenian of the fifth century; if it hadn’t been for his miraculous intervention in the battle of Marathon, he might never have become elevated enough to have a temple built for him. But on the whole the noontide is his hour. Theocritus writes: ‘Nay shepherd, it must not be; ye must not pipe at noon for fear of Pan.’ The amusing thing is that he was still active enough to influence the superstitious translators of the Septuagint, for he appears in the Psalms as ‘the destruction that wasteth at noonday’. It is not possible to reside long in Greece without coming across peasants who have actually seen the little god; and some feeble-witted children are supposed to have encountered him when walking in the woods.

  In all this, there is something faintly sinister, faintly menacing. Little pockets of wind moving about on bare hillsides, the swish of the sea; then an enormous stillness without echo. In the midst of a siesta or in the middle of the night, one is suddenly completely awake and on the qui vive, one does not know why. A thrilling moment of anxiety intervenes; as if on the veldt one awoke in one’s tent to hear a lion breathing at the entrance. A sudden loneliness assails one. And then, abruptly, the influence, the ghost, the cloud – whatever it is – passes; the wind revives, and the whole island echoes once more like a seashell to the deep reverberations of history. Yes, other islands off Dubrovnik are just as beautiful, but they seem to hold nothing. Here you live in a flower-bed of Greek mythology and poetry, to which sooner or later you succumb because you realize that all these fruits of the brilliant human imagination are not fanciful chimeras but simply facts – the facts of Greek life and nature. And it comes with quite a shock to realize that the roots of our own cultures are buried in this rocky soil. There is no help for it, we are all Greeks, as Shelley once said.

  If you set out from Nydri in Lefkas, a pretty little port, you will have to skirt a number of small islets which confuse perspectives and outlines, and will find yourself wondering how on earth the mariners of old ever managed to operate before the first maps were available. They must have depended not only on star-sightings, but a profound memory-ability to remember distinctive features. In these waters it is notoriously difficult, for the island shapes shift with every movement and appear to superimpose themselves one upon the other; outlines mix and cohere, and often what appears to be one whole island turns out to consist of three lying together in the direct line of vision. On the map all is clear. The little stone bundles have names like Taphos (tomb) and Arkoudi (bear).

  *

  Ithaca and Cephalonia lie side by side – though the latter is much longer, indeed the largest island of the Ionian group. Ithaca, which reverberates with the Homeric legend, is a delightfully bare and bony little place, with knobbly hills, covered in holm oak, which come smoothly down into the sea, into deep water which is rich in fish. The intimacy of the scale and the rapidly shifting levels make a drive about it as exhilarating as a trip on the old-style scenic railways of a funfair. The channel between Ithaca and Cephalonia is about two kilometres broad, approximately the same as the channel which separates Corfu from Albania. The entry into Vathy harbour will set the atmosphere for a first visit – it is most remarkable as well as beautiful. The bare stone sinus curves round and round – it is like travelling down the canals of the inner ear of a giant. One is seized with a sense of vertigo; will the harbour never come in sight? It does at last, buried at the very end of this stony lobe of rock. It is small and not particularly distinguished, but the clearness of the sky and the purity of the water strike one with a sense of pristine cleanliness. The population of nine thousand is that of a small market town. They are friendly and welcoming people, too, and easily befriend the traveller; which is most useful when one needs a guide to visit the Nymphs, say, or the Eagle Mountain – about the two most pleasant excursions in the island. Nothing could convince you more that this was the island of Odysseus than recalling it while actually on the spot: ‘It is a steep little island impracticable for horses, but not too badly off in spite of its smallness. It is good for goats …’ The harbour of Vathy is obviously the old Phorkys, where the Phaeacians deposited Odysseus on his return home, though they did not escape the wrath of Poseidon on their return to Paleocastrizza – or Cannone, whichever you prefer. It is true that the Grotto of the Nymphs (which requires a small scramble, possibly with a guide) is rather further from sea level than the text suggests, but this is a small point.

  According to Homer, Ithaca was the capital island of a group comprising most, if not all, of its close neighbours, and it is well situated to enact this role; it is a dream-haunt for the sea pirate; and, if it had one defect, this was perhaps that it was poor in olives and grain, so that it must always have depended on imported goods. Its position is a dominating one – rather like Hydra’s – and Odysseus would have been the right sort of piratical and resourceful king to keep a firm hand on it. Inevitably, of course, the topographical description
s in the Odyssey have set the scholars bickering. The Homeric sites are not all a-hundred-per-cent satisfactory from the point of view of identification; but, without being too indulgent or too gullible, one can certainly believe in the fountain of Arethusa and the Raven Cliff which sheers away up some forty metres into the blue sky. One can also combine a bit of home-made piracy with piety and scrabble about in the Grotto of the Nymphs, in the hope of finding something left over from the treasure that Odysseus buried there under the direction of Athena.

  The present Marathia is where they say that the piggeries of Eumaeus were situated; but this is drawing a bow at a venture. The most vexing of the topographical problems is the site of the town and the palace of Odysseus. Inevitably, two schools of thought have grown up which hold diametrically opposite opinions about the site. One pitches it at the port of Polis on the north-west corner of the island, and the other at Aetos, right on the midriff, the narrowest point between the two land masses. Meanwhile, a third candidate has started to become manifest with new excavations at Pelikata, which, it is pointed out, is admirably situated from a strategic point of view between the bays of Port Polis and Port Phrykes. All that is certain is that there are signs of settlements which were certainly inhabited at the appropriate Mycenean time.

  Does it matter? Yes, in a profound sense it does, even though presumably we shall never be certain of our ground in this game of classical hide-and-seek. The little island is full of atmosphere, and we can enjoy it all the more because of Homer’s descriptions and by joining in the paper chase of the scholars. It is certainly the right place in summer to pitch a tent or rent a room chez l’habitant; it is equally right to re-read the relevant passages in the Odyssey and see what you feel about the sites already chosen. Nobody is happy about all of them – but there are several which can be accepted without demur. The holidaymaker, however, will have most pleasure if he rents a little boat at Port Snow (Hioni) and paddles among the rocky headlands.